10 Mar
2017
10 Mar
'17
12:34 p.m.
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy cordially invites
you to its talk by
Thomas
Metzinger<http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/institutes/theoretical-philosophy/thmetzinger/>
(Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz)
Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - 17:30-19:00
Location: CEU, Nador 15, Room 103
Mental Autonomy and Mental Action
I will have two central goals in the first part of this talk, which explores the relevance
of latest research on mind-wandering for theories of consciousness. First, conceptually,
and in opposition to what many philosophers following Descartes and Kant traditionally
have liked to believe, I will argue for the claim that conscious thought actually is a
subpersonal process, only rarely a form of mental action, but rather an unintentional form
of mental behaviour, and demonstrably for more than two thirds of our conscious life-time.
The paradigmatic, standard form of conscious thought is non-agentive, it lacks
veto-control, and involves an unnoticed loss of epistemic agency and goal-directed causal
self-determination on the level of mental content. Second, I present an empirical
hypothesis: There will be a detectable self-representational blink (SRB), a small time
window I which we are blind to ourselves, namely, when shifting from one phenomenal
self-model or "unit of identification" (UI) to the next. Alluding to the
well-studied phenomenon of the attentional blink (Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell, 1992,
Shapiro, Raymond, and Arnell, 1997), the notion of a "self-representational
blink" refers to the fact that we are typically not able to consciously experience
the actual moment of transition from mindful, present-oriented self-awareness to the
identification with the "protagonist" of a daydream, the content of the
self-model in autobiographical planning, etc. Phenomenologically, the SRB is characterized
by a brief loss of self-awareness, followed by an involuntary shift in the phenomenal UI;
functionally, we can describe it as a failure of attentional and/or cognitive
self-control. The empirical prediction is that subjects should be blind to self-related
stimuli during the SRB, and my main hope is that the audience can help in developing novel
experimental paradigms to test this hypothesis.
If time allows, I will also take a closer look at the concept of "mental action"
in the second part. Can we conceptually accommodate mental actions under a predictive
processing approach? My main positive claim will be that mental action is the predictive
control of effective connectivity, where what is predicted is the epistemic value of
states integrated into the phenomenal self-model under counterfactual outcomes.
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
Social Mind Center Events at CEU: http://socialmind.ceu.edu/events
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu